Sunday, 2 November 2014

Halloween cheesy snacks, reflections and the dangers of Pinterest

In Australia we are fond of saying that Halloween is an American import. In my house, E says that Halloween originates from our Celtic heritage. It is not something I grew up celebrating. I was in the supermarket on 31 October and was shocked at how pillaged the lolly aisles looked. Halloween is a growing tradition here but we are still uneasy about it.

I have mixed feelings about posting Halloween recipes here on my
blog. I enjoyed the Halloween pumpkin cupcake at True North in the
above photo. Yet commercialisation of the day makes me uncomfortable.
Halloween is very much about remembering the dead in our house. I grew up with the Catholic tradition of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. The 31 October is
the eve of the birth and death of Alex and Ian. We remember our sons with a
lunch and cake on their birthday each year.

Then there is our 5 year old Sylvia who loves all that is spooky and scary. And so I too cannot resist some of the fun of Halloween. After all, death is not all about sadness. (TS Eliot said, in my beginning is my end, but he might well have said in my end is my beginning!) She is starting to get excited at planning this birthday meal with us. We invite our family each year and this year Sylvia invited a school friend too who came with her mum and little sister.

Some Halloween themes are creeping into the birthday food. I have started collecting ideas on my Halloween Pinterest board. Which had me dreaming of all sorts of weird and wonderful food art. When I told Sylvia that we would make some Halloween snacks, she was so excited. They looked like lots of fun to make. While I am sharing them here, I warn you that they were not as simple as they looked on Pinterest.

All morning yesterday Sylvia kept asking when we would make broomsticks. I waited until about an hour before everyone was expected. It seemed quite a simple recipe. Perhaps it would be even easier if we had string cheese that seems quite popular in recipes in the USA. Instead I followed the instructions on Kidspot. They make it look pretty easy too.

The cheese on the first few broomsticks I made crumbled and the chives broke when I tried to tie the cheesy bristles onto the pretzel broom handles (which were small because that was all I could find). I finally got the hang of it with spring onion ties but it was too hard for Sylvia.

No matter, I said to Sylvia, you do the bats. Poor child! These were probably our biggest failure.
I saw a pin where someone used dark grapes with blue corn chips for wings. It seemed a good idea to use cherry tomatoes and hold the bats up by shoving the toothpick into a chunk of cheese.

I apologise for only sharing a photo of the one bat we managed to get to stand up for a while. It was too difficult trying to get the rest to stand up - if the cherry tomatoes weren't so big that they fell over, the corn chip wings either drooped or were too heavy for the poor wee tomatoes. I wont be doing these again. Though the one that worked did look impressive overseeing the platter like an edible dark lord!

After the broomsticks and bats drove me a little batty, I went easy with these olive spiders. I really liked the idea of putting olive spiders on a pizza or a little cheeseball. But they were too much work. I had the ingredients for the cheeseball but in the end I took the shortcut and just spread cream cheese on a round cracker and cut up black olives in a spider shape.

If I had had more time I would have made more. However I accidentally bought ones that weren't pitted which created challenges with cutting them up. I only made four of these because I was running out of time. They looked too good to eat and so I never tried one. All I can say is that a few hours later when we were clearing up the crackers were really soft.

Despite all my complaints about making the Halloween snacks, they weren't too time consuming and delighted the kids. I really enjoyed eating the broomsticks. All the snacks made a fine and fun contribution to a simple lunch of vegies, sourdough focaccia, pretzels, blue corn chips, dips and some kale chips that was brought along by Sylvia's friend's mum. Naomi also kindly brought the lovely flowers from her garden. And a good time was had by all.

I will post the monster cake and monster rice krispies from the lunch in the next day or two. Meanwhile, though you can also find them all over the blogosphere, here is my take on the cheese and pretzel broomsticks.

Cheese and pretzel broomsticks
From Kidspot (which has a useful video demonstration)

spring onion, preferable at least a few days old
sliced cheese (we used Swiss cheese)
pretzel sticks

Firstly take the floppy green end of the spring onions (trimming off any
manky bits) and use a sharp knife to cut longways into very thin long
pieces of spring onion.

Take a square of sliced cheese and cut in half. Use a sharp knife to cut slits into the cheese to make a fringe on the bottom half of the long edge. (I found it easier to handle if the slits were about 0.5cm and did not got any further up that halfway towards the top of the rectangle.)

Place the end of a pretzel stick along the edge of the cheese rectangle with the fringed bottom facing away from the pretzel. Roll the cheese around the pretzel so that you have a fringed bottom like a broomstick (as in the photos).

Place broomstick on a plate. I found mine quite fragile so it was best to put them where they were going to be and minimise handling.

22 comments:

Happy Belated Halloween, Johanna and to your family! I didn’t celebrate Halloween and mostly stayed in! I’m so happy you get to celebrate Halloween, these broomsticks and bats are so adorable, I love them, they are like little edible toys! These are probably the best and creative Halloween treats I've ever seen so far! Absolutely fun to eat and delicious!! :)

I grew up in the states and Halloween was just a part of my life. When I moved to Australia 20 years ago, my Aussie husband said it 'just isn't done' here. Every year though I see more and more advertising and more people talking about it. The only thing I did this year apart from buying candy for those brave enough to knock on the door was to dress the dog up as a bee. I like the broomsticks!

Thanks Maureen - I remember seeing halloween on tv shows as a kid and it seemed so foreign. I think the world seems so much smaller now with social media and the web that maybe it doesn't seem so odd to celebrate another country's holidays now. I hope your dog had fun in the outfit and amused the kids who knocked on your door :-)

I can't say Halloween is one of my favorite celebrations Johanna. When my kids were young I barely got through it, lol...I do think some of the homemade goodies are quite creative these days. Of course when they are healthy, all the better! Yes, danger lurk at Pinterest:)

For me, when most people here (like me) say "Halloween is not an Australian thing", it's more the trick or treating/candy aspect, not the actual roots of Halloween itself. I will never accept the word 'candy' being used here either, unless we're talking about Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson!

I tried tying things with chives once and they kept breaking. Your decorations look great, I never seem to be able to recreate all those lovely pinterest pins. I would definitely have done the cherry tomatoes too only to have them fall everywhere!

Thanks Veganopoulous - I would agree about the trick or treat aspect not being what Halloween is about (though interestingly my sister in Ireland tells me it is huge there too) and yes 'candy' just always sound foreign to me.

I had a few little cherry tomatoes and then decided to buy some bigger ones but they were too big to balance on the toothpicks - poor sylvia had a hard time of them collapsing everywhere.

Halloween is rising here too, there was apparently a shortage of pumpkins this year and some punters were taking the opportunity to sell them on the side of the roads for extortionate prices. I am going to follow you on pinterest, love those edible brooms. I was invited to a Czech and Slovac Halloween Party a the weekend, and saw similar spider olive canapes there. Plenty of inspiration.

Thanks Shaheen - your halloween party sounds like fun - I have lots of ideas on pinterest and started a halloween board this year - that is amazing that there was a shortage of pumpkins - it is one of the vegetables that I consider as common as potatoes but then again our who take on pumpkin in Australia is quite different to the UK and USA

I know what you mean about being slightly uncomfortable about the whole halloween thing and the commercialism that comes with it. But it does invite the opportunity to make some amazingly creative food which can be incredibly striking (no matter how much of a pig it is to make!). Those broomsticks are fab!!!

Thanks Kate - yes I love how creative food is at halloween and it is much appreciated by my partner who loves spooky stuff (which is where Sylvia gets it from). And perhaps it is comforting to know that you really need to make the broomsticks at home as I can't imagine a version that could be sold and stay together :-)

I would be curious to know if Halloween was big in the UK when you lived here...I was surprised to find it even more notable than in Australia, given I too associated it with America. Perhaps the Celtic aspects pulled it into British sentiment.

I am very impressed with your Halloween food and can completely understand it being harder than it looks! Well done with getting things together in quite a short space of time.

Thanks Kari - I didn't think Halloween was huge in the UK when I lived there - for the most of it we lived in flats where you needed a key to get in to the stairwell and we didn't have friends with kids. My sister says it has always been big since she started living in Ireland years ago.

I think one of the hard things about the food was that I felt it wasn't the sort of food that could be made ahead of time so I was making unfamiliar recipes close to when the guests were expected

I don't like to celebrate it either however it does seem to be permeating our culture at an ever-increasing rate. I'm so sorry to hear about your twin boys - the day must certainly already have so much emotion for you xx

A lot of people just make the assumption that Halloween is American because it is huge there but yes it isn't originally. I love it and yes it is commercialised but so is every other big holiday out there. I'd rather be celebrating them than not.

What adorable snacks! I grew up with a father who LOVED Hallowe'en. He would set out all of these super scary decorations to scare all the little children and he would dress up and take my sister and I trick or treating. I still love Halloween =)

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Recipes and reflections in which our vegetarian heroine dreams of being tall and graceful as a giraffe; being a goddess in the kitchen; and being gladdened by green gadgets, green food and green politics because green is the colour of hope. See About Me for more info.